Praise be almighty Helix

Originally the plan was just to have nondescript chaos happening in that last panel, but the rise and reign of Twitch Plays Pokemon gave me far superior inspiration. The intrigue, drama, and cooperation in the face of adversity of this rollercoaster has inspired me with new faith in humanity, every victory they score is a victory for all of us. If tens of thousands of people can pull it together enough to collectively progress through a game of Pokemon, there’s sill hope for this species.

It is the Twitch players pokemon joke. Helix fossil follows anarchy while the dome fossil follows democracy. The guy with the wings is dressing up as pidgeot the true prophet and Flareon as the false prophet or follower of the dome fossil. (you should see some of the fan art for this)

I recently picked up a Chrome extension that changes all instances of “Jesus” to “Bird Jesus” and “God” to “Lord Helix” and I can no longer properly distinguish between Twitch references and actual discussions

Well, I mean, they are all clones and probably made from scratch to begin with as well cuz they are meant to be the perfect war machine or something. And I’m pretty sure you just have to hit them in they’re feeding tube port (I think that’s what it’s for) not necessarily stick something in there. But that may only be a new Doctor development, were there Sontarans in the original Doctor Who?

Really? Remember, he did evolve Mr. Fish from a Magikarp by beating the crap out of all the Pokemon in his way with Mr. Fish as a flail. Jared has some darkness that can be unearthed. All he needs is a little ANARCHY. PRAISE THE HELIX.

Explains even more about why he gets all bent out of shape when people treat him like a doll they can strap lazers to or can change at marketing whim. He’s made mention of it- but this is the moment it sinks in.

The concept is pretty simple. Do you know the saying ‘Sit 1,000 monkeys at a 1,000 typewriters and you’ll eventually get the complete works of shakespeare’? It’s a saying denoting that 1,000 idiots can do what a single genius can. That’s the concept here. This twitch person is playing one of the original pokemon games, but he’s not playing it based on his own ingenuity. He’s set up some kind of thing online where he’s pretty much asked the collective internet to guide him through the game. I honestly don’t know much about it myself, I just understand the concept, but I’ve managed to gather two things from all of the webcomics referencing it. The first is that Twitch has either never played the original pokemon, or is restraining himself from doing what he knows or at least suspects to be the proper way of doing things. And the second is that there’s apparently a HUGE schism among the internet on whether to take the dome or helix fossils. I choose dome myself. I only get it because Kabutops looks awesome. I never use any of the fossil pokemon. I only get them for the singular purpose of completeing my pokedex.

Twitch is not a person, it’s basically a program set to feed chatroom commands into a Pokemon ROM. At and given moment thousands of people are feeding individual commands to the program one at a time like “up down left right a b select start”, but trying to cooperate and oragnize the endavour enough to progress forward. There’s an imrov game where you get a big group of people and have them try to count to ten without anyone talking over anyone else or any two people starting to say the same number at the same time. Twitch is like that except it’s 70,000 people trying to play pokemon.

Just to add, twitch is a streaming site where people stream themselves playing video games. So it’s named that way because it’s played by the twitch community instead of a single person. (Though with it appearing everywhere many players probably have never visited twitch before.)

The saying about 1000 monkeys is not referring to 1000 idiots being able to do the work of one genius. It is about how given infinite time, 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewrites will eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare, not because they know what they are typing, but because they are given infinite time and therefore have an infinitely long string of characters.

Even so, EVENTUALLY the ‘anarchy’ will (hopefully) resolve in a complete playthrough of Pokémon Red Version, and not necessarily any more through collective intent than sheer volume of attempts. So yes, it’s not the most perfect metaphor, but still pretty damn apt from the right perspective.

I read somewhere that Twitch is less 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters than it is 100,000 monkeys at one typewriter where 80,000 of them are trying to type and the rest are just screaming and throwing sh!t everywhere.

The crucial difference is that TPP isn’t a string of randomly chosen Game Boy inputs, which would, in fact, finish a Pokémon game given enough time (enough time probably being a few millenia). TPP is a string of deliberately chosen inputs, received so that it’s 1) difficult to coordinate any tasks and 2) trolls can easily sabotage progress.

I was going to say thatRNG Plays Pokemon is a pretty good analogy to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, but then I looked at the progress page and realized there have been multiple “interventions” to get the RNG unstuck.

I don’t know why someone would think they “weren’t real people”. I know that is a standard thing in a lot of sci-fi involving clones/golems/whatever term they are using that day. I have just never really understood that point of view. More than likely I am missing something.

I can’t sympathize with the idea that something being “natural” or not is important. I can’t agree with “natural”=good, “not natural”=bad, what leads to good consequences is good, what leads to bad consequences is bad. I would say the same about concepts like “normal”.

You may want to rethink your wording on the second half of that second sentence. The way you wrote it makes it seem like you’re saying that the ends always justify the means in all situations. And I dearly hope that’s not what you meant because that is a very narrow minded view that has been repeatedly shown to not be a favorable one.
Also from what I gathered OddStrange wasn’t saying that “not natural”=bad but rather that “not natural” makes you do a double take. And that’s pretty much how your brain works, not some form of prejudice or something to look down on. Your brain notices things that are out of the ordinary for many reasons, one being because it’s trying to evaluate whether it’s a threat, another because of natural curiosity that makes you want to investigate.
I mean, if you were walking down the street and you suddenly saw a guy with a gigantic robot arm do you seriously think your eyes would just glide over them like they do if you see some completely Average Joe? Cause if so that’s not a sign of some high level of acceptance, that’s poor situational awareness.

A gigantic robot arm and a vat-grown biological replacement are completely different things, but both are equally unnatural. Would the vat-grown replacement cause you to do a double-take? Unless it looked completely outlandish, I’d bet that no, it wouldn’t.

What makes you do a double-take is the appearance of something foreign. It doesn’t matter if it’s natural or not, just whether or not you’ve seen it before.

No, but if you found out that the person was a test tube baby you would do a double take, which is what I’m talking about. That’s exactly what happened to Jonesy. Granted, the “You’re not real people” bit was way over the line, but finding out the someone is genetically engineered is certainly going to make you double take, just as seeing someone with a robot arm would. It’s the same reaction. And something “not natural” is by it’s very nature foreign, at least to your brain. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it is a perfectly natural reaction to do a double take.

I have a cousin who’s a test tube baby. She’s the product of IVF, since her mother has issues that make it hard for her to conceive. I didn’t know this until she was 4 years old, since it isn’t something that’s physically apparent. I didn’t do a double take. And it isn’t like I was a young kid who didn’t understand what I was being told either, since I was 23 at the time. There was nothing about her to indicate that she was conceived through something other than natural means, just like there’s nothing about the Commander to indicate his origins.

What I’m saying is that unless it’s visibly foreign you both won’t notice and won’t care. Only if/when you’re told will you have any reason to care, and if you then treat them differently you’re a bigot, no matter what your justifications about them being “unnatural” may be.

Your use of a cybernetic arm was an apt one for your side of the argument, because it’s visibly unnatural and would cause you to immediately recognize it as such if you weren’t exposed to them frequently. Which is why I countered with the example of a vat-grown biological replacement. It wouldn’t be visibly unnatural, save for some possible scar tissue where it was attached, and so you wouldn’t do a double take at all if you saw one.

If you were to show up on a farm populated by nothing but Dolly clones, you’d say “That’s a herd of sheep.” because that’s exactly what it looks like to your brain.

So you’re telling me that when you learned she was a test tube baby you had no interest in how it worked, didn’t have any curiosity about why or how? It didn’t stick out as something memorable about that person? Because that’s what I mean by a double take. You learn something foreign to you and it catches your notice. When did I say ANYTHING about treating someone differently? I didn’t and am offended that that’s what you think I was implying. And of course you’d only know if you were told, the robot analogy was one example of an overly obvious situation, but it’s just one example.
And the point wasn’t just that you would immediately notice, it was then when you learn that something is different it catches your attention. This doesn’t mean you treat them differently or any kind of prejudice, like I’ve said in every post! Would you stop trying to make me out to look like some kind of antagonist and just listen to the point!
When my boss first told me stories of how he was a child soldier in his home country it immediately caught my attention. I didn’t treat him any different, didn’t start peppering him with questions and didn’t make a big deal out of it, but it stuck out to me and I took notice. The concept of child soldiers was not something I’d ever witnessed personally, only read about, and thus was foreign. It was something that stood out because it was something unusual to me. That is what I meant.

When I learned my cousin was a test tube baby my thoughts were “Oh, well that’s neat. Go science!” and that was it. I had known her parents struggled with having a baby, and I had figured that they just got lucky with her prior to learning the truth. I just don’t see what kinds of hangups people could have with it, because until you know that you just think she’s a normal little girl. Heck, she probably won’t ever know that she wasn’t conceived naturally.

But then again, maybe I’m just jaded or something, because almost nothing makes me do an actual double take anymore. Maybe I’ve just been exposed to too many different cultures and technologies, but it has to be something really weird, like the Surinam toad, to make my brain do backflips over how weird, foreign, or unnatural it may be.

The way I see it, anything that exists or occurs in the universe is by definition natural. Just because something is artificial or designed, doesn’t mean it’s less real or genuine; it’s all a product of circumstance, even if that circumstance includes a degree of intentionality.

If your AI robot-friend is robot-sad, and you disregard it because it’s ‘just a machine’, that still makes you a terrible human-friend.

I will always be there to comfort my robot friend when he’s robot sad and how dare you say otherwise!
But I think you’re missing my point. My point was that anything out of the ordinary or something you’re not used to will cause you to do a double take and take notice because your brain is unfamiliar with whatever it is.
The simple fact is that things that are different, unusual, foreign could all be considered “unnatural” to your brain because it doesn’t recognize it and thus takes notice. This isn’t prejudice, this is your brain trying to analyze things, like determine if it’s a threat, if it’s friendly, what it can be used for, things of that nature.

Actually, no human being can really create anything. The whole sum of all human knowledge is based upon what we observe & learn about nature itself. The only thing humans can do is shuffle around the ingredients that nature already provides for us. In effect, there is nothing “unnatural” we can do, unless it’s something that leads to self-destruction…Because THAT’S how nature works.

Except that it doesn’t, because any form of assisted reproduction isn’t really natural birth, and yet no one except the most hard-line fundamentalists bat an eye at it. The situation with the Commander is simply taking IVF to Gattaca-like extremes.

THIS. IVF is a really unworkable analogy for this situation – IVF is giving nature a helping hand, really; you’re still following the basic premise of ‘egg + sperm + womb = baby.’ IVF is acting like a matchmaker for those two crazy cells, cause they’re having trouble hooking up on their own for various reasons. The commander’s situation is better described as ‘scary spacefuture genetic engineering by powerful controlling organization.’ We’re talking the whole nine yards, ‘scientists playing God’ stuff. Jonesy is totally being insensitive here, but c’mon, genetic engineering on that level IS a scary idea that in our time is set to soon become NOT science fiction. The notion of being able to nip and tuck at DNA to produce a completely custom person? Kinda abhorrent for a lot of people, with good reason. Genetic engineering has the potential to save a lot of lives, but Gattaca has some good points about the downsides to it, too.

Most people haven’t been through natural birth, cause natural birth sucks. We stopped doing natural birth with the invention of pain killers and antibiotics, cause the natural order of things with incredibly high death rates was unacceptable. Look around your room and look at all the synthetic stuff, human love deviated from the natural order cause once again the natural order sucks.

The bird lies. Let not the trials of the Silph Scope and the Safari Zone be so easily forgotten. Fear not the Sharmat-who-is-Flareon, for He is older than Music and knows the ways we must take to better ourselves! Order is Progress, and Progress is our Destiny.

If you asked me that in 1960 I’d probably have said the same thing Jonesy just said, and you’d probably be surprised that I answered a rhetorical question. One prejudice looks just as fantastically ignorant as the other in hindsight, is the point.

From what I’ve seen on the twitch plays pokemon… now mind this is coming from someone who is very jaded about humans as a viable species anymore, it doesn’t give me any new hope for us as a people. They have made some progress, sure, but egads every step of the way… *sighs* but such is the way of people and internet.

A theory that was once put forth by a friend of mine: A crowd of humans is actually less intelligent then their average intelligence quotient. When you want to figure out what the intelligence of the crowd is as a whole, average every one together, then subtract one from the total for each person in the crowd. Yes this can go into the negatives, and with some crowds its been proven to be true. Add anonymity to the equation and that seems to negatively affect peoples ability to be decent people, so toss that over this whole insanity of intelligence downward spiral. The fact they’ve managed to get as far as they have with the game is either a bloody miracle, or proves the game was meant to go forward in even a four year old’s playing hands.

I know a guy who wrote a script to put random commands into Pokemon Red and spent five minutes watching Red wander around his house randomly, play his SNES, and talk to his mom. He realized that he recreated a passable simulation of his home life.

Interestingly, a lot of experiments have shown the opposite. A group of humans are better at guessing the quantities of (x jar full of things) than any one, because biases cancel out. A crowd of people successfully controlled a flight similar with skill when the average of their left/right inputs were taken. Etc..

It is harder to get information from a group, but collective intelligence can do a lot.

No one is saying that directly. The style of bubble and the fact that it’s faded means this is what’s being chanted in the background. The only one saying something for sure is St. Pidgeot Jared there.

LMFAO! This is going to backhanded, sorry can’t avoid it, but this is the funniest page we’ve gotten in a while, imo. (I know that doesn’t mean much.) Can’t wait to find out more about commander next week.

Wait, “temporary alternate present created by Commander’s absence”? So let me suss this one out: If the alternate present was created by the absence of Commander then I’m going to assume that it is how things have gone since he left. Now if that universe was created (or continued after he left only to be eradicated when Commander returns) by the by Commander jumping to the future then it has only existed from the length of time between the jump and this comic. So waiting room time, maybe like 15 minutes to 3 hours, walking down the hallway with Captain lithe yet handsome, 10 minutes?, that alternate present has only been absent Commander for at most a few hours and its already gone to that.

…And that’s entirely reasonable from what we’ve seen of Commander. He is a badass after all, a collected badass with good managerial skills.

Well, that’s assuming that Commander & Jonesy don’t return from the space-future to a point in the present just shortly after they left the present. That’s why this is an ALTERNATE present that would get wiped out.
Time travel works best (at least, in this comic) when you don’t think about it too much.

Yeeeah, basically this means Coelsquid’s going to veto the joke when Jonesy and Commander get back. Pity. I would have liked them to have come back to this point and have to deal with the drama when they get back. Could lead to more jokes and some action but hey, what do I know?

It would have to have been the plan for a minimum of half the comic, but I’d wager easily it’s been in the works since near the beginning. Most comic creators aren’t going off half-cocked and creating each comic off the top of their head on the fly if they have any kind of story to their comic. If there’s a story to be told, you create at least a basic script first. Character backgrounds and so on. The reason I say at least halfway, though, is that the whole ‘marketable soldiers’ theme took center stage when when the big ‘bishounen virus’ event came along. So it’s been a pretty central part of Commander’s life for quite some time.

I spent a little while looking for the gun-shooting-smaller-guns comic (it took way longer than it should have taken, because I kept stopping and admiring the amazing early Jared faces), and in case anyone else was going to do the same, the link is http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/07052010. Hope this saves someone some time.

Despite some issues with releasing pokemon into the wild, and boxing and unboxing some of their strongest (which took well over a day to resolve), they’ve got a rather strong team, including a Zapdos, which they somehow managed to use the Masterball on.

They did have to use the “democracy” mode (which only inputs the most common suggestion in the last 20 seconds rather than all of them) to finish some navigational puzzles. But even whether to use “democracy” or “anarchy” (original) mode is chosen by users.

This is perhaps the most brilliant reference to TPP I’ve seen yet on the web. And I’ve seen some doozys. The -only- thing that disappoints me about this image is that there’s no one abusing the PokeFlute, but you can’t have everything.

Has no one yet addressed that Kratos is wearing a skinned Flareon on his head? I mean, what the hell?

Also, I have to be curious as to where Mr. Fish is in all of this. I would imagine just off somewhere unconcerned and watching TV, but when the cable bill doesn’t get paid, he’s probably gonna be pretty pissed.

It fits. In the context of Twitch Plays Pokemon, Flareon is the eeveelution that nobody wanted but they ended up accidentally getting. If the Helix Fossil is a god and Pidgeot is Bird Jesus, Flareon is an antichrist figure.

I really really hope when this is all over, we can see Jared in that costume in the normal timeline. For no real reason. He doesn’t even have to know the reason, maybe just feels he was supposed to be in it. But I want a better up-close view of that outfit.

… And now I’m asking myself why I didn’t realize that earlier, considering how he’s one of the main cast and among the few scrawny enough to fit in that suit. Maybe it was the mask and Captain Falcon felt like a pun.

In Red, yes, largely because it predates the physical/special split by a good 3 generations and Flareon’s best stat is Attack, which is Not Good for a special-based type.

These days, Flareon is… well, still not that great, thanks to a lack of decent physical fire moves. Flare Blitz is really the only halfway decent one it can learn, and the recoil effect makes it impractical on something as fragile as Flareon (base 65 HP and 60 defense? OUCH.)

I wonder if we’ll meet The Commanders three siblings while we’re here in the space future. Or if the council he’s going to see to complain to will be a mockery of the judges from the hunger games given that the future space-time military symbol is a mockery of the mockingjay pin.

No, I mean shameless and irrelevant. Coelasquid heard about TwitchTV being the most popular meme of today, and so she decided to attempt relevancy by swiping at that low-hanging fruit. Only problem is that in about 6 months from now, it’s gonna make this comic look even more dated than it already is.

Or I found a thing on the internet that made me happy and realized that it would perfectly fit into a spot in this present story that had previously just been reserved for the general, random chaos of Jared in charge and chose to use it so that years from now I could look back and remember how much I enjoyed a thing that briefly touched my life. That’s also a possibility.

I don’t know if you expect me to apologize for including pop culture jokes in a pop culture joke webcomic, but if I cared all that much about dated references I probably would have felt worse about that Power Rangers joke straight outta 1993 from a couple months back.

Dude, seriously, you need to drop the snobby entitled tone. This is a free webcomic that costs you nothing to enjoy, and the artist is running herself ragged to give it to us because she’s a successful professional with a million demands on your time. Quit acting like somebody overcharged you for something you ended up not enjoying.

What I want to know is, how far into the alternate present are we? Did we actually skip ahead a few days, or did this literally all go down in the span of a baseball game + casual walk down a space hallway? ‘Cause I’m kinda hoping it did happen that quickly.

so.. is this a “Brave New World” scenario? Are the Commander and the others grown from natural DNA, and brought through the various stage in vitro, “decanted” as babies and raised naturally thereafter, or are they grown in a bottle to adult stage like – oh, Rocky in the Rocky Horror Show?

I’m thinking here also of a Blade Runner/ Androids Dream etc scenario. where the androids are physically very similar to humans, indeed to specific humans BUT physiologically different in that they cannot repair or reproduce, wear out in about four years and can be distinguished by identifiable mental and physical characteristics.

The difference would be that a “Brave New World” Bokanovsky clone would be physically and mentally human by any meaningful test, but a “Blade Runner” android wouldn’t be by quite specific indices

“Aheh, yeah, that was a shitty thing to say, wasn’t it? Sorry, I was just surprised. So, what do you guys call yourselves? Tube-kids? Pod-people? I want to chew him out for not telling me, but I don’t want to inadvertently slur you guys in the process.”